INTERNACIONAL PROTECTION

(3.1) INTRODUCTION

The question of what to measure when investigating the impact of policy is a fundamental one. Early decisions about what indicators to utilise or what types of data to gather will determine the political framing and utility of the results. In this thesis, human security has been adopted as the framework for assessing US military aid policy in Pakistan. This chapter will establish the rationale for this particular approach, considering the many other types of indicators that could be used to gauge the success of this type of foreign intervention. It will attempt to posit the research in a theoretical overlap between the ambiguous normative outlook of the human security concept, and the more practical orientation of emancipatory focused critical security studies scholarship. Both views have in common the determination that true security comes in the form of freedom from threat. This perspective will be harnessed to provide a guide for measuring security in the case of Pakistan, and thus the extent to which military aid is effective in providing it.

The first section will establish the historical development of the concept of human security. It will argue that many of the values of human security have already been internalised in the policy language of states that have invoked principles such as Responsibility to Protect, which includes the US. This makes a prima facie case for the legitimacy of using human security as a framework for assessing foreign policy at a general level.

The second and third sections will deal with locating human security within the wider landscape of theories of international politics and security. It will draw the parallels between human security and the emancipatory focus of certain strands of critical security studies. While the potential for an integration of approaches is highlighted, the deep concerns other theoretical perspectives maintain over the analytic or prescriptive utility of human security will also be made clear.

The final sections will deal with the operationalization of the concept for research on foreign policy. It will outline the strengths in adopting a restricted view of human security that focuses on ‘vital core’ as a

51 commonality bridging a wide variety of research into conflict and instability. It will establish the immediate study as an attempt to hybridise this restricted, policy centric vision, with the emancipatory logic of welsh school approaches that will aim to deliver a critical, yet policy focused, appraisal of the human security impacts of US military aid programs in Pakistan.

(3.2) A DE FACTO SEC URITY PARADIGM? SOVE REIGNTY AND SECURITY POST COLD WAR

While the ‘conventional view’ (Garrett, 1998, p. 71) of the globalising era is of a normalisation of political economic perspectives that minimize or challenge the centrality of the state (Christie, 2010, p. 172) (Hirst, 1997, p. 409) (Fukuyama, F., & Bloom, A., 1989), mainstream perspectives of state relations to international security have also changed substantially, albeit at a slower pace (Christie, 2010, p. 172). As the bipolar era of the Cold War ended, the focus of mainstream debate reoriented away from issues of strategic competition between the superpowers to ‘new wars’, referring to the apparent increase in the volume of civil conflicts globally (Kaldor, 2005) (Melander, E., Oberg, M. & Hall, J., 2006). Although the empirical basis for such an interpretation has faced serious challenge (Melander, E., Oberg, M. & Hall, J., 2006) (Newman, 2004), the growth in its popularity reflected shifting perspectives in international norms (Barkin, J. S., & Cronin, B., 1994, pp. 125-127). The dominance of realism, secure in its position throughout a bi-polar era that regarded sovereignty as the primary constitutive rule of international organisation, began to face challenges from various international relations theory perspectives (Lebow, 1994). In particular, proponents of Liberal Peace, Just War Theory and Cosmopolitanism amongst others, would question whether we would witness a ‘rolling back of the state’, such as was perceived in the political and economic spheres of the globalising world, with reference to reorganisation of the concept of sovereignty away from the state towards individual persons (Richmond, 2004, p. 133) (Malmvig, 2001, p. 251). This would be the context for a new conceptualisation of international security utilizing the person, rather than the state, as its referent object.

In the Cold War era, the state was ‘reified’ within its borders, which provided the capacity for tremendous internal repression, domination and even genocide without significant threat of outside intervention (Barkin, J. S., & Cronin, B., 1994, pp. 125-6). The fragility of international relations between the superpowers meant that

52 the idea of intervening in conflicts for the purposes of humanitarian defence was almost inconceivable within the parlance of realism (Lebow, 1994, pp. 276-7). Indeed within the period there are very limited cases of such operations being attempted. The interventions of India in East Pakistan, Vietnam in Cambodia and Tanzania in Uganda are regarded as the few genuine Cold War era humanitarian military interventions (Shraga, 2011, p. 20) (Seybolt, 2007) (Walzer, 2002) (Finnemore, 1996). These actions were regarded with open hostility by many states in the international arena (Finnemore, 1996) due to the potential for undermining sovereignty, or the strategic upset involved in the downfall of allied or neutral regimes . More importantly as Walzer has argued, had the Security Council been called into session on any of these cases it almost certainly would have decided against authorisation for intervention due to great-power opposition (Walzer, 2002, p. 4). As Barnett maintains, the UN’s predisposition at this time was to favour the sovereign rights of states in situations of internal repression or ethnic conflict (Barnett, 1997, p. 565). The approach reflected the deep-seated contradiction in the UN Charter that holds the organisation responsible for upholding the universal rights of peoples while also professing adherence to a guiding principle of non-interference in internal affairs (Ibid). As such, while moral appeals were made in diplomatic discussions (Finnemore, 1996), in each case mentioned above, the intervening parties framed the justification for their actions in the context of their own national security (Seybolt, 2007, p. 9) or the need to support the self determination of peoples from neo-colonial expansionism (Finnemore, 1996).

As the Cold War came to an end, it became clear that the barriers towards interventions of a political, economic or military nature by the remaining major powers, could be substantially lowered (Barkin, J. S., & Cronin, B., 1994, p. 126). For realists attempting to reconceptualise international relations in a new multi-polar era, the potential fallout from the lack of deterrent restrictions held potential for heightened distrust, new arms races and the proliferation of major conflict (Valentino, 2001, p. 61)(Mearsheimer, 1990). Critics of this interpretation countered the argument with the observation that, to the contrary, it was security

communities, of the kind described by Karl Deutsch in 1957, that were proliferating by the end of the century (Lebow, 1994) (Adler, 2008). Indeed throughout the 1990’s, a security community born out of the Helsinki Process, would grow to successfully encompass NATO, the EU through to the Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC) and even reach parts of the middle east (Adler, 2008, p. 197). Such communities were seen as the predictable consequence of a normalisation of political and economic standards across many states in the

53 context of a globalised world. While, as discussed above, the classical centrality of the state was facing

challenge in popular political ideology, in international security the state would no longer be seen as a lone actor in the anarchic world characterised by bi-polarity, but as a node in a network that reflected a functional international community (Begby, E. & Burgess, J.P., 2009, p. 91).

The gradual shift in the interpretation of both security and sovereignty was reflected in several hallmark pieces of literature produced by NGOs over the course of the post-Cold War period. Among the most prominent documents in the early years was the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Security Report entitled ‘New Dimensions in Human Security’ produced in 1994 (UNDP, 1994). While the idea of developing a human security framework to rival national security was not new, the UNDP’s report provided a platform for discussion. It problematized security in a new light by positing, ‘a secure state, untroubled by contested territorial boundaries could still be inhabited by insecure people’ (Thomas, N. & Tow, W.T., 2002, p. 178). As the UNDP report maintained :

“The concept of security has for too long been interpreted narrowly: as security of territory from

external aggression, or as protection of national interests in foreign policy or as global security from the threat of nuclear holocaust. It has been related more to nation states than to people….Human security is a universal concern. It is relevant to people everywhere, in rich nations and poor. There are many threats common to all people- such as unemployment, drugs, crime, pollution and human rights violations. Their intensity may differ from one part of the world to another, but all these threats to human security are real and growing (UNDP, 1994, p. 22).”

This interpretation of ‘human sovereignty’ in contemporary international politics would influence many responses to international crises. The guiding principles enshrined in the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ report subsequently produced by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) maintain that sovereignty should be seen in relative terms, taking priority in all cases except for those when a host state proves unwilling or unable to provide protection to civilians within its territory (ICISS, 2001). The fundamental shift in attitude was in the attempt to reconceive sovereignty in terms of responsibility rather

54 than rights, both in terms of potential interveners and the intervened (ICISS, 2001, p. 3). If a state cannot live up to its ‘responsibilities’, namely the provision of a basic standard of political and socio-economic protection, that state may no longer be considered to exercise ‘legitimate’ authority and thus can potentially lose the sovereignty otherwise protected under Article 2.1 of the UN Charter (ICISS, 2001, pp. XI, 7, 55). While the report is clear in its intent to emphasize responsibilities in security discourse, ‘rights’ do still make a centrally important contribution, being discussed in reference to the ‘right to protection’ enjoyed by individuals in any state (Chandler, 2004, p. 64). This basic premise found international recognition through Kofi Annan’s description of “Two Concepts of Sovereignty” in the aftermath of NATO’s operation in Kosovo:

“State sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined—not least by the forces of globalisation

and international co-operation. States are now widely understood to be instruments at the service of their peoples, and not vice versa. At the same time individual sovereignty—by which I mean the fundamental freedom of each individual, enshrined in the charter of the UN and subsequent international treaties—has been enhanced by a renewed and spreading consciousness of individual rights. When we read the charter today, we are more than ever conscious that its aim is to protect individual human beings, not to protect those who abuse them (Annan, 1999).”

Human security has acted as a basic organising principle for Responsibility to Protect, as the principles that have informed its own development have normalised R2P’s understanding of the adequate execution of a state’s security responsibilities to sub-state populations and individuals (Wheeler, 2005, p. 98). Human Security, for the ICISS, concerned “people - their physical safety, their economic and social well-being, respect for their dignity and worth as human beings, and the protection of their human rights and fundamental freedoms (ICISS, 2001, p. 15).” In terms of sovereignty, this included recognition that “the security of people against threats to life, health, livelihood, personal safety and human dignity- can be put at risk by external aggression, but also by factions within a country, including “security” forces (Ibid.).” The language is at many points indistinguishable from that of the Human Security literature.

55 However, the extent to which a concept of ‘Responsibility to Protect’ or any existing iteration of human security has been, or indeed can be, successfully operationalized in the international system continues to be debated (Charap, 2013) (Welsh, 2011) (Badescu, C.G.& Bergholm, L., 2009) (Focarelli, 2008). The contention for the purposes of this thesis is that while a prescriptive vision of human security may be far from established, consistent interest in its capabilities as a policy assessment tool have reformulated the concept as something more akin to a school of enquiry for research on insecurity.